Facebook’s battle with Twitter just got more interesting. Two months after its homepage redesign, Facebook’s iPhone application has caught up to the web version, and now features real-time updates.

This is actually a much bigger deal than it sounds. Facebook is clearly looking to take on Twitter with its recent focus on realtime and the way it allows celebrities to broadcast their updates to fans. And one of the key elements to Twitter’s success has been its mobile-friendly nature, allowing users to both update and see their friend’s updates just after they happen.

Facebook users have been able to submit photos and their status updates from their iPhones since last year. But until now, its iPhone app was stuck with the News Feed of Facebook past, displaying a handful of stories that were typically hours (and sometimes days) old. You could always browse over to the ‘Status Updates’ section to see more recent items, but they were never placed front and center.

We’re not sure when the new version went live (the changes appear to have been server-side), but the iPhone’s news feed now displays its first three items in ‘real-time’, while reserving the remainder of the feed for the ‘highlights’ – older items that it think you’ll be interested in. All real time updates appear to be limited to status messages – I’m not seeing any of the updates from applications or photos that I see in the web-based version.

This is probably only a taste of things to come. Facebook has a new iPhone application in the works, which is likely going to be timed to release alongside (or soon after) the launch of iPhone 3.0, and I suspect real-time will play an even more important role.

There have also been a few other subtle changes, like adding tiny profile images next to status updates (which actually makes the feed look almost exactly like FriendFeed’s current iPhone layout, seen below).

Source: TechCrunch